First day of graduate classes

Today was the first day of instruction at UT Knoxville. I would have had two classes to attend in person, but due to possible infection I attended virtually through Zoom. The genetics/genomics course launched into an introduction to rice plants. Overall this university seems to have a much stronger emphasis on plants than UIUC and I may need to do some reading to shore up my plant biology knowledge. The first biochemistry lecture was mostly class organization. After classes I spent the afternoon doing the first genetics assignment in its entirety to have it done.

I still haven't received results from the coronavirus test yesterday. Symptoms are roughly unchanged, still just a mild sore throat with occasional headache and cough.

Self-isolating

I woke up this morning with a minor cough, headache, and possibly sore throat. I had planned to stop by campus again today, but as the self-screening tool reminded me, these are all symptoms consistent with COVID-19. After filling out the appropriate form from the screening tool, I was advised by a university response team to get tested. I went to the Student Health Center; they took a quick nasal swab (not the super invasive kind) and a throat sample (for a strep test). The strep test already came back negative, but I won't know the viral RNA detectability results for another day or so. Until then I will attend class remotely to be safe.

Graduate orientation begins

Early this morning was the start of the Graduate School's online orientation. It mostly focused on professional development opportunities and campus resources. I learned about a center for refining teaching/learning methods, which sounds very helpful since I'll be TAing in the spring. I signed up for a 1-credit online class this semester called Best Practices in Teaching Biology. Tomorrow is the graduate teaching assistant orientation, again an all-morning online event.

Undergraduate research archived

 Today I attended an online lab meeting of the research group I was in back at Illinois. My mentor presented my recent figures and new work he did in lab. To preserve my tools in case someone needs to extend some work I did, I tidied up and cataloged all the files in my "lab work" folder. I exported my electronic notebooks from Benchling, added them to the archive, zipped the whole thing up, and stored it in a lab Box folder. This concludes my work for that lab.

Relocated to Knoxville

Today I spent 13 hours in transit from the Quad Cities to Knoxville. All the stuff got unloaded pretty quickly but is currently in a big mess around the house. Tomorrow I'll start unpacking for real and take care of things like getting Internet installed.

Registration complete

The online registration system was giving me some trouble, but with the assistance of university staff I have now successfully registered for all the core first-semester courses in my graduate program. I checked the bookstore's web site but textbook information doesn't seem to be available for fall yet. I will keep an eye on that and order books as soon as possible.

Another app workaround

Today while testing the app features I added yesterday, I noticed that my bus app was completely failing to display departure information. The bus company's server is currently returning empty departure lists for all stops, and very slowly at that. I had a workaround ready to go for when that server doesn't provide departures, but the slowness in response was causing my server to give up before reaching the fallback plan. I reorganized the error handling and my app can now use a fallback for all routes' information.